Zika virus initiative reveals deeper malady in scientific publishing

Moves to speed up the release of Zika virus research in response to the public health crisis highlight a systemic failure in scientific publishing. Help could be at hand at the ASAPbio meeting today in the USA

Too far behind a screen - Zika scientists are set to benefit from the rapid release of research on the virus
Photograph: Victor Moriyama/Getty Images

In response to the rapid spread of Zika virus across Central and South America, now declared to be an international public health emergency by the World Health Organisation, a consortium of research funders, institutes and publishers have committed to sharing data and results relevant to the crisis “as rapidly and openly as possible.”

This is a very positive move by an array of influential organisations that includes the Wellcome Trust, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Médecins Sans Frontiers, the US National Institute of Health, the Chinese Academy of Science and leading publishers such as the Public Library of Science and Springer Nature.

The arguments for sharing data, and the consequences of not doing so, have been thrown into stark relief by the Ebola and Zika outbreaks.

In the context of a public health emergency of international concern, there is an imperative on all parties to make any information available that might have value in combatting the crisis.

These are strong words and should lead to practical action. Funders are charged with ensuring that the researchers they support will publish their “quality-assured interim and final data as rapidly and widely as possible”. This will make their results available for assimilation and use before they have been submitted to a journal, temporarily bypassing the traditional and often protracted business of peer review. In turn, journal signatories have undertaken to make all Zika research free to access and not to penalise Zika researchers for having released their data early by disqualifying their manuscripts from review and future publication.

The hope is that the rapid release of information will quicken the pace of ongoing investigations into the outbreak and efforts by the international community to come up with new preventative measures and treatments. Among the most pressing questions are how Zika has spread so rapidly to the Americas and whether the suspected links with microcephaly and Guillain–Barré syndrome are genuine.

While the temporary abandonment of peer review may seem troubling, this need not be problematic. Serious researchers, mindful of reputation and the public health issues at stake, are likely to take due care in releasing their data. As a separate safeguard, the early and worldwide access enabled by this initiative will maximise the number of potential readers who can provide post-publication peer review. If errors do slip through, they are likely to be flagged up quickly.

Peer review, preprints and the speed of science

Read more

So the move is sensible, proportionate and necessary. But it also raises a raft of questions for the organisations involved and for the scientific community at large.

For a start, the initiative only applies to research on the Zika virus but what studies will qualify for its special provisions? Science is an interdisciplinary endeavour. Insights into Zika virus transmission, pathogenesis and treatment will come not just from researchers working on the virus or the disease. They are likely also to arise come from studies of insect-borne viral diseases, from work on other flaviviruses (the family to which Zika belongs), and from studies on the cells types and molecules that interact with the virus when it infects mosquitos and humans.

Then there is the question of other emergent diseases. Chikungunya, Nipah, West Nile, Hantavirus have all risen to prominence as threats to human health in recent years. And what about more established infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, rotavirus, and influenza virus, which between them kill millions of people every year? Or the rising tide of antibiotic resistance? Or other areas of research into healthcare or public policy that could benefit from the rapid and open dissemination of new results? The Zika initiative rightly speaks of an ‘imperative’, but is there any less imperative to tackle the problems of climate change, or the search for more secure supplies of food or renewable energy?

There’s another problem: the commitment to rapid sharing of Zika research is temporary. As I understand the situation, the initiative will only endure as long as the present emergency. However welcome and beneficial the temporary relief, it is a sticking plaster that does little to assuage the underlying maladies of scientific publication.

The real difficulty for the scientific community is that we remain tied to a publishing system that retards the dissemination of information because of its overwhelming preoccupation with using publications to award academic credit. Researchers will spend months chasing for spots in the most prestigious journals because at present we are locked into a system that judges us by the reputation of the journal where we publish, even though the measure of that reputation is inaccurate and dysfunctional.

In other words, the central problem is that our research ecosystem provides no incentives for publishing reliably, rapidly or openly – all features that one might hope to see in a system that works effectively. Despite a decade or more of talk about open access, a digital transformation that could revolutionise access to the research literature, we are still mired in technical and cultural debates that – to our shame – remain largely internal to the ivory tower.

A taste of this can be found in the review of the UK open access policy published last week by Professor Adam Tickell. Although the UK has made some decisive moves on open access, progress has been slow. Tickell is obliged to negotiate the vested interests of academics and universities obsessed with journal-based modes of assessment, and publishers who earn healthy returns under the status quo. As a result, the language of his report is tentative, incremental. Critical notes are muted and there is a dispiriting but seemingly inevitable call for more research. The review lacks the sense of purpose evident in the Zika initiative.

But across the Atlantic a clarion call to action offers the prospect of more radical surgery. Today and tomorrow a small group of scientists and representatives from journals, learned societies and funders will gather at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland to discuss a different publishing future based on preprints. The Accelerating Science and Publication in Biology (ASAPbio) meeting echoes the spirit of the Zika initiative in drawing attention to the value of preprints – rapid communications that have yet to be peer reviewed – in accelerating and widening access to the research literature.

Who knows what will happen? The discussion is likely to be robust, argumentative. But preprints are gaining ground – thanks to support of scientific heavyweights, some of whom will be in Maryland – and the main objective of the ASAPbio meeting is to clear yet more ground by clarifying the rules for their acceptance by researchers, journals and funders. Beyond that, it is hard to tell where things will lead, but incentives for researchers who publish rapidly and openly should be high on the agenda. Because why should taxpayers continue to support a system of scientific publication that restricts the dissemination of research – and the good that might come of it?

@Stephen_Curry is a professor of structural biology at Imperial College.